Toshiba also says the price of NAND will drop 50% every year from now on

While solid-state drives (SSDs) aren’t the most popular storage medium in
notebook computers right now, they are expected to grow significantly in the
near future. Toshiba Semiconductor is betting that SSD drives grow
significantly over the next three years and is enhancing capacity and reducing
costs to grab that growing market.

Toshiba plans to address several issues currently keeping SSDs from becoming
more widely used. Toshiba is also addressing the concerns with regards to the
rewrite limit for multi-level cells used in today’s SSDs. Saito said at the
conference that, “If data is efficiently concentrated and stored in caches in
an effort to reduce the frequency of rewrites, rewrites on SSDs can be reduced
to a number far below 10,000 times in five years, even for heavy PC
users."

Other major hurdles for the widespread adoption of SSD drives are the price
and capacity current drives offer. Toshiba s addressing the capacity issue by
working on miniaturizing the production process it uses from the current 43nm
process it introduced in March 2008 to 30nm which it expects to introduce in
2009.

Toshiba will also improve multi-valuing by moving from its current
3-bit-per-cell product to a 4-bit-per-cell product. SanDisk beat Toshiba to
market by a month with its 40nm
3-bit-per-cell process in February of 2008.

The price premium for SSDs compared to 2.5-inch Hard drives is expected to
drop to a 3.2 times premium, roughly half of what it is now according to
Toshiba.

"If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." -- Scientology founder L. Ron. Hubbard